William N. Copley
Untitled, 1956
Acrylic on canvas
19 1/2 x 28 1/2 in
49.5 x 72.4 cm
$68,000

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William N. Copley (1919-1996), the New York-born painter, writer, gallerist, collector, publisher, and art entrepreneur, began his career in the arts as a dealer of Surrealist and Dada titans René Magritte, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell and Yves Tanguy. Such was the impact of their work upon the imagination of this American eccentric—who dubbed himself CPLY—that he began to paint on his own in the 1950s after shuttering his Los Angeles gallery. Mixing eroticism, symbolism, whimsy and darkness, CPLY earned the enthusiastic encouragement of the very artists whose works his business had represented. By the early 1970s, he developed a signature style in which everyday objects or (more often and now legendarily) sexually explicit couplings were presented against lushly patterned backgrounds. In these paintings, Copley emerges as a mediator between European postwar art and American Pop Art, and a bemused if troubled guide through the charged sexual, psychological and emotional terra incognita he once referred to as “the tragedy of man and woman."

Untitled (1956) is a wonderfully detailed work on canvas from the earliest period of Copley's work as painter. Comprising a crisp white ground perforated by a network of organically shaped apertures, the composition peeks in on twelve apparently unrelated scenes. Following the financial ruin of his short-lived but era-defining Copley Galleries in Los Angeles, Copley moved to France in 1951, where he lived for a decade in a house in Longpont-sur-Orge, near Paris. With the majority of his attention turned to painting, Copley quickly assembled a signature style, notable for its graphically powerful renderings of simplified forms. His paintings from this period featured a series of repeated motifs, including depictions of guillotines and interpretations of Édouard Manet's 1863 painting Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. Untitled features both of these motifs: an imprisoned man is consigned to death at the painting's left, and three figures sit for lunch in the grass towards in an aperture towards the bottom left. Copley began exhibiting his work more frequently in the years following his expatriation, though this painting predates his first New York exhibition, "Paintings by William Copley" at Alexander Iolas Gallery, in 1958. In 2018, this painting was featured in the ICA Miami's exhibition "William N. Copley: The Coffin They Carry You Off In," which addressed this earliest period of Copley's production.

A generation younger than the pioneering Surrealists whose work he introduced to American audiences, Copley pursued a practice that registered the influence of his predecessors, but remained entirely his own. In the years that followed his time in France, he continued to push his signature style, making larger paintings and installations that reflected his individual blend of refined, and occasionally more nefarious, tastes. A crucial figure between the Surrealist and Pop Art movements in the United States and Europe, Copley's own work was celebrated with a major retrospective in 2016, which traveled from the Menil Collection, in Houston, to Fondazione Prada, in Milan, where it was organized by Germano Celant.

William N. Copley:
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